If the condenser and recovery loop are in series, it is probably done to
protect the system from having the condensing loop oversized. I had to
address this concern in the supermarket industry a number of years ago.
A particular supermarket chain purchased the same model of heat recovery
for every store regardless of the size and amount of refrigeration in
each store. This resulted in some smaller stores having an oversized
heat recovery system. This is primarily a concern for part load
operation.

If the refrigerant changes to liquid before it hits the condenser, the
condenser becomes a refrigerant tank. What effectively happens is that
the system's volume of refrigerant (as liquid phase in the condenser)
starves the evaporators. In the case I spoke of, the maintenance people
then added refrigerant to the system which worked until the system
neared design load again and then the system tripped on high head. This
produced an endless cycle of adding/removing refrigerant until we had
the owner resize the heat recovery loop.

And, our standard as refrigeration engineers, was to size the heat
recovery system for no more than 50% credit for this very reason.